What's New

The search engine Ixquick.eu will start to redirect to the search engine Startpage.com later today.

The privacy-focused search engines are maintained by the privately owned Dutch company Surfboard Holdings B.V. One of the company's main goals is to deliver "the most relevant search results under the largest possible umbrella of privacy" to users.

Cloudflare announced the launch of its new public DNS service 1.1.1.1 on April 1, 2018. The company promised in the announcement that 1.1.1.1 would offer faster speeds and better privacy than other public DNS systems provided by companies such as Google, Yandex or Cisco. Let us find out if the promises hold up to a closer inspection of the service.

Google announced plans on Friday to shut down the company's URL shortening service Goo.gl starting April 13, 2018.

Google won't change or disable existing links; all existing links will continue to redirect to the link target.

The Best of Windows Entertainment Pack was released by Microsoft back in 1995 for Windows and in 2001 by third-party publishers to the Game Boy Color.

Microsoft released a total of four Windows Entertainment Pack packages for Windows that it sold as standalone game packages for Windows.

Each pack included seven or eight games; some of the games were classic Windows games such as Minesweeper or FreeCell, others popular games at the time such as Tetris or Taipei (which later become Mahjong Titans and Microsoft Mahjong).

Solomon Hykes, the founder of the major container company Docker, announced on March 28, that he will be stepping down from daily operations within the company, via blog post .

LogMeIn, parent company of LastPass, announced today that it will shut down the cross-browser bookmark synchronization service Xmarks on May 1, 2018.

Xmarks launched its service at a time when browsers did not support native synchronization functionality, let alone syncing data between different browsers.

We reviewed the service back in 2009 for the first time and the rocky pass in the years that followed. The creators wanted to shut down the service back in 2010 but LastPass, makers of the password manager, stepped in and acquired Xmarks in the same year.

I'm a gigantic fan of RPG games. I love a good gripping storyline, that draws you in with great character depth and a deep and intriguing plot. Neverwinter Nights was an absolutely stellar game in my opinion, and it boasted quite the awesome online community as well.

Thankfully, it’s just been released in an enhanced edition on Steam as well as all the expansion packs, by developer Beamdog, with complete support for penguin users!

Krita is a well known digital painting program, available for Windows Mac and Linux, but is primarily known for its Linux side.

On March 22, Krita 4.0 was released, which features some pretty big (and in my opinion, overdue) changes.

Installation

AppCompatibilityView is a new application by one of our favorite developers Nir Sofer of Nirsoft that lists all Windows programs in its interface that run with non-standard compatibility settings.

Windows users and administrators may use the compatibility mode of the operating system to run applications in a compatibility context. Designed for programs that are not (fully) compatible with newer versions of Windows, programs run with compatibility settings may work as intended.

KB4100480 is an out-of-band security update for the Microsoft operating systems Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that "addresses an elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows kernel in the 64-Bit (x64) version of Windows".

Google Chrome comes with a small selection of search engines that users of the browser have access to by default. The default search engine is Google Search but Chrome users may switch to Bing, Yahoo or AOL Search in the preferences.

Chrome picks up search engines that use the open search format automatically when you open a website. These search engines become available as well, and you may make them the default search engine to add them to the list of permanent search engines of the browser.

Android device owners have a couple of options when it comes to blocking ads on their devices. One of the better options, as it is application independent and does not require root, is to use a DNS filter proxy.

The method works similarly to how hosts files work on computer systems. DNS is used to "translate" domain names to IP addresses that computers communicate with, and a hosts-based solution blocks access to known domain names by changing the information on the device.

WebRTC is one of these new technologies that is on the one hand pretty useful and on the other a privacy nightmare as it can be abused.

WebRTC, the RTC stands for Real-Time Communications, is a set of APIs that all major web browsers support. Its primary use is to integrate better communications capabilities in the browser that websites and services may utilize for voice and video chat, and other communication forms.

WebRTC is enabled by default in Firefox, Chrome and other browsers, and websites and services may use it without user interaction.

I stated previously in my article about things to do after installing a new distro, that I love to make my sound as beautiful to my ears as I can. Sure, users can go out and spend thousands of dollars on amplifiers, headphones and other physical equipment, and it’ll do much better than an pure software solution... But PulseEffects is a really awesome second choice, for GNU/Linux users.

Microsoft will release the next feature update for the Windows 10 operating system, called the Windows 10 Spring Creators Update, in April 2018.

The company releases feature updates twice a year; these updates introduce new features and bigger changes to the operating system opposed to cumulative updates which tend to focus on security updates and bug fixes.

Feature updates take longer to install as it is closer to installing Windows from scratch than installing a smaller update.